How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science
Walk into any tech company or university math department, and you'll likely see a gender disparity: Fewer women than men seem to go into fields involving science, engineering, technology and mathematics.
Over the years, educators, recruiters and government authorities have the gender and warned that it can have dire consequences for American competitiveness and continued technological dominance.
It isn't just that fewer women choose to go into these fields. Even when they go into these fields and are successful, women are more likely than men to quit.
"They tend to drop out at higher rates than their male peers," said , a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. "As women enter into careers, the levels of advancement aren't as steep for women as for men.
Schmader and a colleague, at the University of Arizona, recently came up with an innovative way to study one dimension of the gender gap in fields such as computer science and engineering.
Mehl often uses a device known as an Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) in his research. It's an audio recorder that the psychologist can attach to volunteers. The device automatically turns itself on and off.
"We program the device to record for 30 seconds every 12 minutes," Mehl said in an interview. "That gives you about 5 soundbites per hour, or 70 soundbites per day."
By "sampling" people's daily lives, Mehl said his recorder often picks up on things that people don't notice. Most of us remember only the highlights of our days — an interesting conversation or a ballgame. But much of the time, our lives run on autopilot, and we don't notice what's going on. Mehl said getting detailed information about what people do during the majority of their time is central to understanding them psychologically.
The sampling technique has revealed flaws in common stereotypes. Take the one about how women like to talk much more than men. When Mehl actually measured how many words men and women speak each day, he found there was practically no difference — both men and women speak around 17,000 words a day, give or take a few hundred.
Mehl and Schmader said in interviews that they felt the unobtrusive sampling technique could shed some light on why women who'd made it through grueling Ph.D.s and become science and math professors might feel like throwing it all away.
They had male and female scientists at a research university the audio recorders and go about their work. When the scientists analyzed the audio samples, they found there was a pattern in the way the male and female professors talked to one another.
When male scientists talked to other scientists about their research, it energized them. But it was a different story for women.
"For women, the pattern was just the opposite, specifically in their conversations with male colleagues," Schmader said. "So the more women in their conversations with male colleagues were talking about research, the more disengaged they reported being in their work."
Disengagement predicts that someone is at risk of dropping out.
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And another article:
Stereotype threat harms female, minority performance
BY ADAM GORLICK
Let's say a white student and a black student both score 1020 on their SATs. They're performing right around the national average, so based on their scores it stands to reason they're both typical students with the same level of potential, right?
Wrong, say psychologists at Stanford University and the University of Waterloo. According to a study slated for publication in Psychological Science, the black student is likely a better student and has more potential. His performance was likely hurt by the worry that he might be perceived as confirming the stereotype that blacks do poorly on intellectual tests. This worry, called stereotype threat, prevents him from doing as well as he could, the researchers say.
Stanford's Greg Walton and Waterloo's Steven Spencer tested nearly 19,000 students in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Sweden. They found that when stereotype threat—which is often embedded in standardized testing and general classroom environments—is minimized, ethnic minorities and women outperform non-minorities and men at the same level of past performance. That means the black student who received the same 1020 on the SAT as his white classmate would likely have scored higher in the absence of stereotype threat. His 1020 underestimated his true ability.
Walton and Spencer found that stereotype threat causes a broad range of black and Hispanic students to underperform on the SAT by about 40 points. And it lowers many women's scores on the math portion of the test by about 20 points.
"Women and minorities are running into a headwind," said Walton, an assistant professor of psychology. "Their scores underestimate their true ability."
Walton and Spencer call the idea "latent ability." But the notion that stereotypes affect performance does not only apply to minorities and women in academic situations, the researchers say.
"The stereotype that white men can't jump can undermine white men's athletic performance," Walton said. "A normal feature of how we work as humans is that we are affected by how other people may perceive us. It's disturbing to think that, if you perform badly, other people could think negatively about your group. It's distracting, and it undermines performance."
When it comes to standardized tests like the SAT or GRE, stereotype threat comes across in subtle ways. Students are often asked to identify their race or gender before taking the exam, which puts those issues front and center in their minds. Or they may simply be aware of a general stereotype, such as "men are better at math than women," so when they take a test the stereotype comes to mind and hurts their performance.
But by doing things like putting demographic questions at the end of the test, by telling students that tests are gender-fair or by having them reflect on their personal values before taking the exam, stereotype threat goes down and the performances of minorities and women go up, the researchers found.
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